than one third of its $40 billion in revenues in 1999 “came from the Far East
Theatre Starr helped carpet bomb and liberate.”9 Greenberg let AIG be used by
the CIA for placing many of its Asian officers, and continued to keep tabs for
“the company” on places like China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and
Taiwan. The company’s massive database in San Francisco was also made
available to the CIA. In 1995, Greenberg was one of the candidates to become
the next CIA director.10
It’s a small, tight-knit world, and they don’t call AIG’s favorite trading partner
“Government Sachs” for nothing. Treasury secretaries under the two previous
presidents—Robert Rubin with Clinton and Hank Paulson with Bush-II—went
from running Goldman Sachs into the most powerful financial position in the
administrations. That’s just for openers. The company pretty much had a lock on
high-level jobs at the treasury. Neel Kashkari—pronounced Cash-Carry—started
out as a low-level Goldman investment banker, and now runs the bailout under
the government Office of Financial Stability. Are we surprised that AIG and
Goldman became the biggest beneficiaries in the bailout?
Goldman Sachs’s history has some intrigue in it, too. This company was
founded back in 1869 by Marcus Goldman, a German immigrant who slowly
built it up with his son-in-law, Samuel Sachs. They made a killing off the 1929
stock market crash, and applied that knowledge later to the dot-com and housing
booms. The formula of the most influential investment bank on the planet has
been described like this: “Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative
bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums
from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and
corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative
pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust,
leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire
process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money
at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart
guys keeping the wheels greased.”11
To get a grasp on what’s lately been going on, we also need to take a look at
our central bank, otherwise known as the Federal Reserve. The Fed controls our
monetary policy. By changing the supply of dollars in circulation, they have
influence over interest rates, mortgage payments, whether the financial markets
boom or collapse, and basically whether our economy expands or stumbles. But
the Fed is only partly an institution of government. The stockholders in a dozen
different Federal Reserve banks in different regions of the country are the big